2006: Reading Year in Review

I just closed the books on 2006 (bringing my reading notebook up to date), ending with 345 books read. A lot of those are comics collections and similar stuff, so that's not as impressive as it looks. I won't list them all here, since I have mentioned nearly all of them in this blog at one point or another (and the last six months worth has been covered by Book-A-Day).

I don't have a separate record of "real" books, but I do keep track of stuff I read for the SFBC, which was 91 for 2006. (That's a little low, mostly because the pace of business now means that I rarely have the time to read something unless I'm sure I'm going to buy it.)

My current reading notebook goes back to 1997, and I've fluctuated from a low of 259 books a year (in 2000, after I stopped buying comics for the club and when my first son was young) to a high of 361 in 2002 (when I think I did book-a-day a lot to get rid of short books). I've been over 300 books in a year for eight of the past ten years -- 1999 (the first full year with Thing 1) was the other exception, at 268.

Reading for work has similarly fluctuated, from a high of 159 in 1998 (a lot of that was comics and art books that I was deciding among for the club, but that was also the year I finally broke down and stopped being the SFBC's most prolific report-writer) down to a low of, well, this year. I've also noticed books getting longer, which is a real pain when I need to buy about 65 books a year (and when I'd prefer to read them all first).